Gwendolen Fairfax

More than any other female character in the play, Gwendolen
suggests the qualities of conventional Victorian womanhood. She
has ideas and ideals, attends lectures, and is bent on self-improvement. She
is also artificial and pretentious. Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whom
she knows as Ernest, and she is fixated on this name. This preoccupation
serves as a metaphor for the preoccupation of the Victorian middle-
and upper-middle classes with the appearance of virtue and honor.
Gwendolen is so caught up in finding a husband named Ernest, whose
name, she says, “inspires absolute confidence,” that she can’t even
see that the man calling himself Ernest is fooling her with an extensive
deception. In this way, her own image consciousness blurs her judgment.

Though more self-consciously intellectual than Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen
is cut from very much the same cloth as her mother. She is similarly
strong-minded and speaks with unassailable authority on matters
of taste and morality, just as Lady Bracknell does. She is both
a model and an arbiter of elegant fashion and sophistication, and
nearly everything she says and does is calculated for effect. As Jack
fears, Gwendolen does indeed show signs of becoming her mother “in
about a hundred and fifty years,” but she is likeable, as is Lady
Bracknell, because her pronouncements are so outrageous.